Dogs and vegetables

[imomus]

Today I have a loose canine theme to my entry. Animator Joji Koyama is based in London (where he studied Fine Art at Goldsmith's) and has made pop videos for Four Tet. His pseudonym is Woof Wan-Bau, a name which combines the sound of a dog barking in the English, Japanese and German languages. You can watch his latest film, an animation entitled Watermelon, on the Mesh page of Channel 4's website. It uses a sliver of music by the talented Tujiko Noriko, whose sexuality becomes ever more stiflingly Bardotesque as she ripens. (Wolf whistle!) By the way, Noriko's fifty minute radio broadcast is worth a listen, even if you don't speak Japanese. It gives a good overview of her music, whose strangeness makes the perfect counterpoint to the silliness of her giggle. (Showbiz gossip: last thing I heard, Tujiko Noriko, who lives in Paris, was dating Julien Loquet, the very talented figure behind musical projects Gel and Dorine_Muraille.)



Atelier Bow Wow is an architecture practise in Tokyo. They also sometimes call themselves Atelier Wan Wan, after the sound of a dog barking in Japanese. (I love the word 'atelier', by the way. I hope one day to have an 'atelier' of my own.) The animal theme continues in Atelier Bow Wow's designation of a certain kind of haphazard, domestic, small-scale architecture found in Japanese cities: they call it 'pet architecture'. I've chosen an early project by Atelier Bow Wow to illustrate what they do, 1992's 'Kiosk for Vegetables'.



Vegetables now take over as the theme of this entry. The highlight, for me, of Osawa Tsuyoshi's 'Answer with Yes and No!' exhibition at the Roppongi Hills art gallery this September was a greenhouse filled with photos of women all around the world holding 'vegetable machine guns' made up of the contents of their favourite recipes, in a cross between Patty Hearst and a cookery show.



I'm sure there are some vegetable clothes somewhere in On Conceptual Clothing, an interesting-looking group show by artists and clothes designers currently being held at Tokyo's Musabi University.